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Soldier's Delight Hundred in Baltimore County

SOLDIER'S DELIGHT HUNDRED IN BALTIMORE COUNTY.

Soldier's Delight has been one of the most extensive tracts of land in the State; it filled at one time a large place on the maps and in the records; yet I cannot find any one who knows much about it, and, when I resided in Baltimore County, I never was able to come across any one willing to admit that he lived there.

I know that I did not live in Soldier's Delight, though often accused of it, and though adjacent to it, as I was adjacent also to " Possum Hollow " and to " Dumb Quarter." It used to be said at Princeton College that all the North Carolina students claimed residence either in Virginia or South Carolina—just across the line—and there are to-day hundred of likely farmers travelling the Liberty and Reisterstown roads, who will inform you, with delicious sincerity, that they dwell "just on the edge" of Soldier's Delight.

The reproaches which the ancient hundred had to meet are not as sharp now, however, as they were at one time. The tract is increasing in value as it diminishes in extent. When I first knew it, about 1844, there must have been several thousand acres of wilderness in the tract, covered thickly with scrubby black oak and sassafras, with a fringe of small pines and spruces—only two roads, the Lyons' Mill and the Deer Park, traversing it in a winding way. It was the easiest place in the world to be lost in, and about the worst place, too, for it was full of pits and shallow shafts, sunk in search of the chromic iron ore which abounded there. It was the place of all others to catch a boy's fancy, however, for these stunted black oaks and pea-stick sassafrases were the primaeval forest. This land had never been cultivated. It was just as the Indians had left it, and there were still legends of solitary deer seen bounding swiftly across its deep openings, and of bears encountered by belated coon-hunters. At that period it was said of Soldier's Delight people that some of them only came out ouce a year—to vote—and that It often took them till Christmas to find their way home again. It abounded in game. The hollows were full of hares; the squirrels from all the country side around came there after the black oak acorns, and every September, just about the equinox, great clouds of wild pigeons used to descend upon it, for acorns and sassafras berries.

I can well remember my first visit to the place. It was in one of these September seasons when the pigeons are supposed to sit still on the trees in order to give you time to take good aim at them. I had beeu in the habit of spending my vacations at Mr. Henry Fite's place, called " Harmony Hall," which was next to Soldier's Delight, but not in it, of course. Mr. Fite, whose wife was my kinswoman, was an ardent sportsman, and a capital shot —if you gave him his own time to it. He was stout, and after dinner, when the squirrels were nutting or the pigeons flying, nothing delighted him so much as to go to a portion of his property, which he called " Standfast," and which was so overgrown with scrub oak and sassafras that I should have thought it part of Soldier's Delight, but for the fact that he protested it was not —and wait, in a blind, for the squirrels to bark and the pigeons to patter down their nuts. The law of the chase was to keep perfectly still, and, as Mr. Fite usually had his after dinner nap, sitting comfortably against a tree in the "blind" while I remained painfully awake, I am able to remember all about it. To compensate me for this tedium, the kind old gentlemen used sometimes to rig up his shandrydan and take me to Soldier's Delight with him. Afterwards I used to take my gun and go thither myself, and the features of the landscape, now almost totally changed by the impertinent intrusions of cultivation, are indelibly imprinted upon my memory. If you took the line of the Deer Park road you came almost suddenly to a spot where the fence ceased, the great forest melted down into the dwarfish umbrage I have spoken of, and your horse, from plunging fetlock deep in sticky red clay, came suddenly upon a hard dry road that rang under his hoofs with more elasticity than an asphalt pavement in winter. This roadbed was one of the best in the world, though vitiated sometimes by the outcropping of huge green or grey boulders. It was never muddy; it could not be cut into ruts ; it dried in an hour after the heaviest and most protracted rains. There was no soil, so to speak; an inch and a half depth of it only, thin and porous, yielding nutriment to sedge, heather and poverty-grass. There were no briars, save, in hollows, some dwarfed eglantines of most exquisite fragrance. Underneath, was one mass of serpentine rock, finely comminuted on the surface, and overlying the deposits of chromate of iron. This land lay very high. The road traversed two or three rounded shoulders of hills, until it brought you to the highest. Berry's Hill, where in 1753 John Berry was hanged in chains for murder—the legends about his execution are still told throughout the neighborhood. From this point you have one of the finest views I know anywhere.

When the atmosphere is clear you can see all around from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Eastern Shore. Yonder are the Catoctin hills; here winds the valley of the Patapsco ; over there is St. Thomas' Church, and over there again Doughoregan Manor. This way is Annapolis, and yonder flows Pipe Creek. As I first saw it, Soldier's Delight was singularly park-like for the work of nature.

The woods were not continuous. The oaks grouped themselves in little groves, in which the quercus ilicifolia, with its compact head and its glistening waxy leaves, looked very handsome, in spite of its gnarled and weazen trunk and limbs—and the sassafras were distributed in orchards. At intervals an open glade extended down the hill side until it disappeared from sight in a briary ravine. No wonder they called the place Soldier's Delight. Why should people be ashamed of hailing from this hunter's paradise ? That, I suppose, came from the fact that the place was an elevated tract of barren soil, tilled by poor white people adjacent to fertile lands held by large slave-owners. Even in my time, some three or four families whose estates bordered on Soldier's Delight, the Worthingtons, Randalls, &c., must have held nigh upon 20,000 acres almost in a solid body, while beyond these, on several sides, were some of the chief manorial tracts in the State.

Few people in Soldier's Delight owned many negroes, and the aristocrats on the fat acres in the lowlands rather lorded it over them in cousecpience.

They reckon without their hosts, however, who imagine that Soldier's Delight, as originally constituted, included only poor land and barren hill tops. At one time it embraced the richest lands in the State, the plateau of Westminster, the Pipe Creek and Middletown Valleys, the rich bottom lands of North Branch, where 20 barrels of corn to the acre is not an unusual crop. Soldier's Delight, in fact, like Baltimore County, had uncertain but very wide limits in its earlier stages. The County and the Hundred were both laid off as our western territories are now, with the view to further subdivision as population flows in. Baltimore County has furnished land for Kent, Cecil, Harford, Carroll, Frederick, Howard, and Anne Arundel Counties. Indeed, if we follow the original boundary between Baltimore and Prince George's County, the old county line would have run to the westward of Hagerstown before it struck Mason and Dixon's line. That boundary was the direction of the upper Patuxent.

The old Soldier's Delight Hundred began at the Patapsco, not far from the present Relay House. Its eastern boundary line was the Old Court road, extending from Elkridge Landing across country to Joppa. This road, which still follows the original bed and crosses the Reisterstown road at the Seven Mile House and the York road at Towsontown, is one of the oldest roads in the State. The Annapolis worthies used it to go to Joppa and to Philadelphia before Baltimore was thought about; and it was the Indian path from the Susquehanna to the Potomac at Piscataway. At or about the Reisterstown road. Soldier's Delight Hundred met Back River Upper Hundred. The dividing line between these two election districts ran northwest through the sites of Westminster and Taneytown to the Pennsylvania line, all of Baltimore County southwest of that line falling to the Soldier's Delight.

This old Hundred, therefore, at one time included parts of what are now Cross and Lisbon Districts, in Howard County, with portions of what is still called "Carroll's big woods"—that is to say, the Forest—the second and part of the fourth districts of Baltimore County, the Freedom, Franklin, Woolery and New Windsor districts of Carroll, and the Liberty and other districts of Frederick County west to the Blue Ridge.

Its early population was not at all in proportion to its size. In fact, when the Hundred was first laid out, there were no people in it at all, except in the neighborhood of Elkridge. Baltimore County was peopled very curiously. The matter is worth looking into because it accounts for the tardy settlement of our city here. I doubt very much whether we should have had a city on this spot at all, but for the iron ores on the Middle and South branches of Patapsco. Baltimore is girded with a belt of very barren land, lying in a semi-circle just outside " the Belt." From Hunting Ridge west to Elysville you find it all barren. That whole width of country, northeast to the Eeisterstown road, is the "White Grounds," a cold clay, full of boulders of trap rock, and impossible to drain. The Germans have lately brought it into tillage and made it productive, but it lay idle for a long while. The barren Soldier's Delight section joined this on the northwest and then you came round to the Bare Hills. There was nothing to invite settlers in any of these lands. Settlers, in fact, did not go upon them. They turned up their noses at the Patapsco and entered Baltimore County by way of the Gunpowder, the Susquehanna, the Bush, Back and Middle Rivers. It was not until settlements had been pushed far up the Gunpowder and Middle Rivers that the fertile valleys of Long Green and Green Spring were discovered.

Simultaneously with this discovery, Anne Arundel planters found out that there were fertile lands to be had beyond the White Grounds. To this fact is due the circumstance that there is such a diiference in the population of the Harford County and the Howard County sides of Baltimore County. The heads of the valleys were taken up by Anne Arundel planters; the more eastern parts by men who came from the rivers or down from Pennsylvania. The heads of the valleys were settled late, however. Worthington Valley was not patented until 1740, and the mass of the population for years after that was gathered about the rivers.

I have spoken of " Carroll's big woods." In fact, the whole interior of the country was called "the back woods," and the whole interior of Baltimore County, down to the top of the hill above us here, Charles and Saratoga Streets, was known as " the Forest." Little Sharpe Street, indeed, which led right up to that corner, was known as Forrest Street originally. The French troops, after the surrender of Yorktown, were encamped in the woods where the Cathedral now stands. All this gives force and intelligibility to the proposition which the Rev. Benedict Bourdillon, rector of St. Paul's Parish, made to the Vestry of that Parish in May, 1741, to build a chapel of ease for the accommodation of the forest inhabitants of the parish. This led to the building of Saint Thomas' Church in Baltimore County.

Dr. Ethan Allen, in his very interesting sketches of the history of this church, says : " The Forest Inhabitants were the residents if what was then called, as it has ever since been, the Garrison Forest. It was so called, because of a fort and a garrison of soldiers, under the charge of Capt. John Risteau, high Sheriif of the County, stationed there, for the defense of these frontier inhabitants against the Indians. The garrison was not far north from where the U. S. Arsenal now is, and was on Capt. Risteau's plantation. This forest was in subsequent years, by some not knowing the previous history of the neighborhood, called Garretson forest, but was so called erroneously." Dr. Allen is partly right, partly wrong. There was a family on the edge of the forest of the name of Garretson, and this may have led some to fancy the derivation Dr. Allen hints at; but that is a modern perversion. All the old settlers knew the name to be Garrison Forest.

Few understood why. There was a garrison there, not only in Capt. Risteau's time, but much earlier. It was possibly not always seated on that same spot. I am inclined to believe, however, that it was always located near the summit of Chesnut Ridge. The relation between Garrison Forest and Soldier's Delight must strike every one. There must have been a connection between the two, and I think it likely that the name Soldier's Delight was ironical.

When the Indians became troublesome, it was the policy of the Provincial government to plant a fort or block-house near them, to overawe them and prevent them from plundering the settlements.

The fort was always an outpost, and in advance of the settlements. Thus, when the Susquehannocks threatened war and water iucursious, Col. Utie planted a fort on the island which bears his name in the mouth of the Susquehanna. When the Shawnees came down into the valleys of Frederick County, Governor Sharpe built Fort Frederick far up the Potomac. Before that, there was a fort at Piscataway, and another one north of it, at Garrison Landing, or Bladensburg, both to keep our Indians at home and to prevent other Indians from raiding upon them. The post in the Forest of Baltimore County was meant to serve several purposes, among others, to prevent Elkridge Landing from being surprised by the Susquehanna Indians, to guard the old court road, and to keep the hunting Indians west of the Monocacy from descending on the various river settlements. It was moreover a resting place and a post of the forest rangers, who rode their patrols around from Bladensburg to Joppa. In making this circuit, and they made it frequently when the Indians were on the war-path, the rangers crossed at what used to be called the forks of the Patapsco (the intersection of the north branch with Morgan's Run) until they struck what is now known as the Washington road, leading from Westminster to the Federal capital. In so doing they had to go through the tangled wilderness I have described. They called it Soldier's Delight because it was so difficult to get through and so easy to get lost in. Thus the section which still bears the title gave its name to all the rest of that widely extended district.

The records of Council proceedings and of the meetings of Assembly are filled with instances of those Indian alarms which led to the establishment of the Garrison in the Forest. In June, 1692, for instance, we find the Council meeting at Job Larkin's, in Elkridge, to take cognizance of the Indian troubles in Baltimore County and appoint rangers. Thomas Thurston was then put in command of the County soldiery. John Oldon writes to the Assembly on the same subject in 1696. Next year there is a letter from Mr. Boothby, and another letter complaining of " Indian insolence." The rangers must have been rather expensive to maintain ; they were often discharged only to be put immediately to service again, and their accounts were carefully audited. I find that in 1697 the troops at Piscataway and in the Forest Garrison were under the common command of Col. Addison, who was chief officer of the rangers intrusted with the protection of the frontiers of Baltimore and Prince George's Counties.

These Indian troubles in Baltimore County began in 1666, when we find some account of English murdered at the mill in Baltimore County. The next year there was a conscription to defend the province, every 20th person was called out and Baltimore County's quota was 36, showing a population of 720, nearly all of whom were east of the Gunpowder. The Garrison in the Forest was established about 1680, and the worst of the Indian troubles were over by the end of that century. The Piscataway Indians wandered off westward in 1699, and did not return in a body to their homes any more. The rangers were discontinued in the County in 1698, but the garrison was still maintained. It was necessary, because, while settlers pushed into the interior along the rivers on both sides of the County, they still avoided the middle part, and the Indians used to hunt a great deal in Soldier's Delight and down through the heavily wooded country where Jones' and Gwynn's Falls have their head-waters. My kinswoman, Mrs. Marcella Worthington, daughter of Joshua Owings, who was born in 1748 and lived till 1842, often used to speak of the Indian hunters who took shelter and got their bread in her father's kitchen, paying for such kindnesses with venison. The Indian troubles continued off and on until 1744, when the treaty with the Five Nations was negotiated at Lancaster. After that they gave no more annoyance until the defeat of Braddock. Then indeed for a time they caused alarm even in Baltimore and Annapolis, and their raiding parties crossed the Monocacy.

Dr. Allen notes the curious fact that in 1756, when there were still comparatively few inhabitants to be found north of the church, "and the county was mostly an unbroken wild-wood, where the Indians and wolves prowled not unfrequently, and the wild deer were often seen and hunted"—"after the defeat of Braddock, in 1775," he says, "the Indians passed down the side of Fort Cumberland to within 60 or 70 miles of St. Thomas, in large parties, for murder and plunder. It created great alarm over all this region, ^.ud it was probably at this time that we hear of those who attended the church on the Lord's Day, burnishing their arms and preparing their ammunition on Saturday evenings, and next day at the sanctuary placing their guns in the corners of the pews during the hour of divine service. This was no doubt so, and yet all this not one hundred years ago [he wrote in 1852] in what we now call old Maryland."

The excitement soon subsided, however, and the central part of the country filled up very rapidly. Still, there were settlements up the Potomac as far as the Monocacy before population came into Soldier's Delight. It was not until 1740 that Samuel Worthington took up the lands in Worthington Valley. Captain Worthington, his grandfather, had a large estate on the Severn.

One of his grandsons took up a large tract of land, part very rich, on the Baltimore County side of the Patapsco, from Elysville to Marriotsville and extending across into Soldier's Delight.

Other settlers passed across in the same way; more spread up from Back and Middle Rivers and from Jones' Falls and the Patapsco, and in 1741 we find Rev. Mr. Bourdillon proposing to give the Forest inhabitants a church. These people could not attend St. Paul's Church in Baltimore town because there were no roads. The town was divided from the fertile forest country by several almost impassable ridges, and the roads followed the lines of the valleys, without attempting to cross the ridges, so that it was easier to go from Joppa to Elkridge than from Pikesville or Randallstown or Towsontown to Baltimore.

The General Assembly passed an act in 1742 in accordance with the petition of the rector and vestry of St. Paul's, empowering William Hamilton, Christopher Gist, Samuel Owings, Christopher Randall, and Nicholas Haile to receive voluntary subscriptions for buying a piece of land and building a chapel on it. The parish was to be assessed to make up deficiencies. Briefly, the lot was selected, and the present St. Thomas', or Garrison Forest Church, as it is commonly called, was built.

Dr. Allen gives the names of the original contributors and the amounts they subscribed. Mr. Bourdillon gave 2,000 pounds of tobacco. Mr. Joseph Cromwell gave £4. He lived in Soldier's Delight, and in 1775 his son Nathan was one of the Revolutionary Committee of Safety for that election district. Edward Fotterall gave £3. Christopher Randall, who gave 300 pounds of tobacco, was of Soldier's Delight. It was he who gave his name to Randallstown, though it was his grandson who tilled the fine property near Randallstown called " Fell's Forest." Charles Ridgely lived at Hampton, in upper Back River Hundred; he gave £3 10s. Thomas Harrison, who gave £3, lived in Baltimore. Dorsey Petticord and William Petticord lived on the edge of Soldier's Delight, near the Patapsco. This was a family that had travelled up by degrees, taking new lands from time to time all the way from St. Mary's. Peter Gosnell lived in the heart of Soldier's Delight. The Gists had the property now owned by the McDonogh School and other land further up the Reisterstown road. Of other names in the list which belong to families still holding their original homesteads, I notice Helm, Ashman, Baker (in Soldier's Delight), Treadway, Choate (Edward), Seater, Stinchcomb, Murray, Howard, Gill, Bell, Chapman, Haile, Cockey. John Risteau's place is now in part owned by Mr. Thomas Cradock; Joshua Owings' place, in Soldier's Delight, went by his daughter's marriage to Thomas Worthington, who also represented Soldier's Delight in the Committee of Safety in 1775. Joshua Owings was one of the first vestrymen of St. Thomas's Church, and acted in that capacity and as church warden several times. He afterwards became one of the first converts of Robert Strawbridge to Methodism ; his son Richard distinguished himself as an itinerant Methodist preacher, and his house was one of the regular stopping places of the preachers of that denomination on their rounds. Asbury made it his headquarters and has left some pleasing memoranda about the family.

The first vestry of St. Thomas' Parish consisted of Nathaniel Stinchcomb, John Gill, William Cockey, Joshua Owings, John Hamilton, and George Ashman, Peter Gosnell and Cornelius Howard, wardens, and Christopher Randall, register. Cornelius Howard's home place joined that of Joshua Owings. The old Stinchcomb homestead, on a ridge back of Randallstown and looking down upon the Old Court road, is standing now, apparently just as it was first built. The Gills still hold the old estate near Dover, and you cannot go amiss for Cockeys in the upper Back River Hundred.

Soldier's Delight, when this Church was first built, still maintained its original proportions. But it and Baltimore County soon began to have cantles cut out of their broad sides. In 1748 Frederick County was established, and in 1750 the boundaries between it and Baltimore and Prince George's Counties were defined, so that Baltimore County and Soldier's Delight ran no further west than the Monocacy. In 1773 Harford County was cut oif from Baltimore.

In 1775 Back River Upper Hundred had been divided, and, besides its owu district, furnished those of Middlesex and Pipe Creek. Old Soldier's Delight now comprehended Soldier's Delight, North Hundred and Delaware Hundred. Delaware was that part of Soldier's Delight lying in the forks of the Patapsco. Rev. Mr. Cradock and his parishioners had built a chapel of ease here, which is now the Parish Church of Holy Trinity.

Dr. Allen's book abounds in curious particulars about St. Thomas' Parish. The names he gives are in great number and nearly always there is some interesting history connected with them. I often think that people do not pay a proper attention, in conducting historical investigations, to names of persons and places and to roads. The history of Maryland could almost be written without other aid if one had but the names of the people, the situs of the roads, and Bacon's and Kilty's laws and the Council book to help out. Names cling to localities in a wonderful way, and yet they travel about as mysteriously as the Rose of Jericho, and sometimes they vanish as suddenly as the Indian tribes vanished from Western Maryland. In Talbot County, for instance, there have always been, from the first, families of the name of Harrison, Benson and Dodson. A hundred years ago there were 150 of the name of Spencer in that county—a hundred and fifty years ago the Edmonstons were both wealthy and numerous there. Now, there is not a single Spencer in the county, nor, I believe, any Edmonstons. Yet I decline to believe these two families exotic or incapable of being naturalized. The Gists of Soldier's Delight have disappeared from there, but you will find them in the West, in Kentucky and elsewhere. The Owingses and the Deyes are disappearing—even the fat lands of Frederick County could not keep them up.

Dr. Allen's little volume contains an anecdote which must afford some consolation to our modern politicians. It proves that there is nothing new under the sun, even to constructive expenses and tenderness as to " records." The old vestry of St. Thomas' Church existed in the days when vestries were vestries. They had police power. They could present people for Sabbath-breaking and other infringements upon the canon law and the ten commandments, and they were finable themselves for non-attendance at vestry meetings. These occurred once a month, by statutory provision, and if a member was absent without excuse, he had to pay 100 pounds of tobacco. The St. Thomas' Vestry were zealous, they lived a long way off, they thought the laborer Avas worthy of his hire, and accordingly, on April 16, 1750, we find them putting a very trifling charge upon the parish, to wit: "Agreed, to have a quart of rum, and sugar equivalent, on each vestry day, and as much diet as will give the vestry a dinner at the parish expense." The sexton was to provide the dinner, at a cost of 8 shillings, $1.06 each time. Dr. Allen thinks this was not much rum nor much dinner—but the register entered a large wide open eye in the margin of the vestry book over against this account; people probably talked about the way the vestry was squandering the public funds, and, on January 7, 1752, it was ordered that each vestryman and warden, in his turn, should provide a dinner and a quart of rum, at his own expense, " to take oft' the great scandal and charge the parish has labored under." It will be noticed that the vestry stuck to their quart of rum even while abandoning the idea of sweetening the beverage at the public expense.

Dr. Allen gives a list of the vestrymen of St. Thomas' parish from 1745 down to 1752, and this list recalls me to what I have already said about the significance of names as guide-posts in history. Some of the names in Soldier's Delight—the baptismal names I mean—are peculiar. Thus the names of Vachel and Rezin, in the Worthington family. Where such names are not kept up by the white people, the negroes perpetuate them. Of the older vestrymen, William Cockey lived in Green Spring Valley, or opposite it, and the farm is still in the family. John Hamilton, whose family had a predilection for naming their females Sidney (it still survives among the Gills), lived on Jones' Falls. George Ashman lived on Satyr Ridge adjoining Cockey. Cornelius Howard, father of John Eager, George, Cornelius (who surveyed half of Baltimore County), &c., lived, as I have indicated, just west of Gwynn's Falls and the Old Court road, his property after his marriage to Miss Eager extending to the Spring Gardens. The name of Urath was and still is a favorite one for females in the Owings family. The Gists were always odd in family names—let Mordecai, Independence, States, testify to the fact.

William Baseman, vestryman in 1746, lived where his descendant still lives, on the Deer Park road, near North Branch, in Soldier's Delight. The name of Vachel, in this family, shows some connection with the Worthingtons. The name of Beale— the way in which it is spelled in all the old records proves that it must have been pronounced Bale—is common to the Dorseys, Worthingtons, Owingses, Randalls, &c. John Pindell, warden in 1751, used to live in Soldier's Delight on a property on the Lyon's Mill road, adjoining Thomas Worthington's. The place was afterwards owned by the Maynards and Oweuses. The Chenoweths lived near the granite quarries at Woodstock, and are there still. Arthur Chenoweth was vestryman off and on from 1749 to 1760. John Ford, 1749, was a Soldier's Delight man, and some of the family are there still, near Reisterstown. Capt. Nicholas Orrick lived in Soldier's Delight, near Waters' campground ; Robert Chapman in Soldier's Delight, near Liberty Road. John Shelmerdine, 1754, lived near, and Joshua Cockey at Cockeysville; Thomas Cockey Deye near Texas. The Stevensons lived in Green Spring Valley, the Johnsons on Chestnut Ridge. Solomon Bowen, vestryman in 1760, was near Black Rock. John Griffith, 1761, was in Soldier's Delight, opposite Pindell; Robert Tevis, 1767, lived near the forks of the Patapsco, adjoining the Welches. The Tevises intermarried with the

Owiugses. They are Pennsylvanians, but the Maryland branches have removed to Kentucky and the west. Elias Brown, the great leader of Baltimore County Democracy, lived in this corner too. The Carnans dwelt near the Church, aud Capt. Nicholson lived at Kensey John Worthington's.

The Soldier's Delight people have nearly all gone away long ago from the Episcopal Church. The rector who succeeded Parson Cradock, Mr. Edmiston, was a Tory; the 40 per poll tobacco tax disgusted them, the Methodist revival captivated them, and they have never come back. St. Thomas' Church gets no members from Soldier's Delight proper. Mount Paran is Presbyterian, Mount Nabo aud the White Grounds are Methodist. The Basemans, Gosnells, &c., go to Ward's chapel, and it was an Owings Worthington who built Marcella Chapel.

The farmers in these rough hills and barren plains were a very different class from the slaveholders and tobacco growers who settled the fertile valleys. They were somewhat rude, independent, simple-mannered, fond of keeping their own counsel, plain and old-fashioned in dress. They liked to go to church and camp-meeting, to talk politics and attend political meetings.

They rode good horses and were fond of fox-hunting. Take them altogether, they were the most primitive people within fifty miles of Baltimore.